Zola's Use of Color Imagery in Germinal

Extract

Germinal is an almost perfect example of what Zola occasionally called his “lie”—his paradoxical manner of achieving at one and the same time both a convincing documentary realism and a strongly symbolic and subjective presentation of reality. Nowhere can this be more plainly seen than in his brilliant, often surprising, use of color. Obviously he owes much in this as in other respects to such predecessors as Flaubert, but he also, more than has generally been realized, shares in the spirit of his own period. While his color terms and images always have a naturalistic basis, the art with which he distributes them throughout the narrative is quite as stylized and patterned in its own way as a canvas by Cézanne. His symbolic treatment of color, on the other hand, suggests affinities with the symbolists, who were rising to a certain prominence in Paris in 1884, the year Germinal was written. Not only does he simplify and organize his colors into a scheme consistent with his dramatic subject, a great strike; he also invests them like leitmotifs with associations expressive of all three levels of meaning of the novel—the dramatic cadre of the miners' strike, the prophetic historical étude of the struggle between capital and labor, and, finally, the underlying philosophical vision of man and nature. Often he gives a single color or group of colors at least three separate meanings which are interwoven and interrelated within the powerful unity of the whole. And, in the process, he transforms, in this and other ways, the colors of ordinary reality into the often far more intense, significant, and emotive colors of dreams, hallucinations, and apocalyptic visions.